Trouble in Paradise: Uncovering the Dark Secrets of Britain’s Most Remote Island

CHAPTER 4 No amnesty

The morning after Pawl Warren’s party, Gail Cox had an uproar on her hands. Ricky Quinn had admitted to assaulting Belinda and having under-age sex with Karen, and the Pitcairn community was furious with him. Cox had to intervene to prevent Karen’s father from attacking him, and Quinn was so afraid for his safety that Cox installed him in the schoolhouse.

The islanders appeared disgusted by the New Zealander’s behaviour. Yet within a few days, public opinion had swung in his favour. Brenda Christian, Steve’s sister, told Cox that some of the locals were saying ‘the girls had asked for it’. Olive Christian’s sister, Yvonne Brown, who was visiting Pitcairn, claimed that Quinn was being ‘treated disgracefully’.

Now the community turned against Gail Cox. Only Brenda Christian and her husband, Mike Lupton-Christian, supported her. The others—as well as resenting an outsider ‘interfering’ in their business—regarded Ricky Quinn as an extremely hard worker and therefore ‘above the law’. Moreover, news had spread that the girls were accusing local men of similar offences—and who knew where that would lead? It was the start of the community resistance that was to characterise the sexual abuse case for years to come.

Despite opposition, Cox was determined to prosecute Quinn, and she scheduled a trial for ten days after the party. In the interim, she found herself undermined by the locals. On one occasion she agreed that Quinn could go home with Meralda Warren, the island police officer, and work with her on her wooden carvings. She was incensed to learn that he had spent several hours with Meralda’s brother, Jay, the magistrate who would be deciding Quinn’s fate, and had also gone fishing with another Pitcairner.

Jay, meanwhile, telephoned Quinn’s father, Richard, in New Zealand and, according to Richard, informed him that he was ‘looking after Ricky’. It subsequently emerged that Jay was hoping to buy a cheap motorbike that Quinn planned to import.

At his trial, Quinn surprised Gail Cox by denying the indecent assault against Belinda that he had earlier admitted. She discovered afterwards that he had acted on advice from Meralda, who knew that Cox was unwilling to call Belinda as a witness. Forced to drop the charge, the policewoman was livid: Meralda had betrayed her confidence and ‘perverted the course of justice’, she says. (Meralda denies it.) The complaint by Francesca had been dropped, at her parents’ request. Quinn pleaded guilty to ‘unlawful carnal knowledge’ in respect of Karen, and was sentenced by Jay to 100 days in prison. As pre-arranged between Cox and British officials, the Governor, Martin Williams, then ordered him to be deported and remitted his sentence. In essence, he was let off.

A few days later, just before Christmas, the young New Zealander left on a ship, carrying two letters addressed to his parents—one from Meralda, the other from Yvonne Brown. Meralda apologised to Richard and Diane Quinn ‘for this whole mess’, saying their son had been ‘a great asset to our island’, and it was ‘our loss that he is leaving’. Yvonne wrote, ‘We have a British policewoman here and boy is she a “pig” … the policewoman blew everything out of proportion.’

Commissioner Leon Salt wrote to Meralda and Jay, admonishing them for unprofessional conduct. He asked Jay, ‘If it is so difficult bringing a case against an outsider, how on earth could a case be brought against a local?’ Of Meralda he inquired, ‘How can we have any confidence that the law is being upheld on Pitcairn?’

With Ricky Quinn gone, Gail Cox was finally able to address the other matter that had arisen from Pawl Warren’s party: the allegations against Randy Christian. And there was a second man in the picture. Belinda had approached Cox three days after the party to divulge that Randy’s younger brother, Shawn, had also raped her. The Englishwoman urged her to let her mother know. Belinda said, ‘Thank you for believing me.’

Cox informed Salt about the development relating to Shawn, and Salt phoned Randy and Shawn’s father, Steve. ‘Tell the boys to get a lawyer,’ he told him.

Belinda’s friend, Karen, had already left Pitcairn for New Zealand, where she would be finishing her schooling, as many local teenagers did at 15. Before departing, she had spoken to Gail Cox informally about one relatively minor assault by Randy. Cox had the strong sense that she had more to tell; however, that was all Karen would say—and she was desperate to get off the island.

Belinda had plenty to say, but she found it difficult to say it. It took her four hours to describe the first time she was raped, at the age of ten, and seven hours to recount all the incidents involving Randy and Shawn—including one where they allegedly raped her in tandem. That was the episode that was hardest to talk about. ‘She was so halting, it was painful,’ Cox told me much later in an Auckland café, speaking for the first and only time about her role in the case.

Never before in her career had the Kent constable interviewed a rape victim. Her investigative experience was limited to traffic accidents. But she was compassionate and sensible. She took an ‘old-fashioned statement’, making sure to record every detail. Then she asked Belinda and her mother to read the statement through and sign it. ‘Those boys should hang for what they’ve done to my daughter,’ her mother declared.

Belinda’s father, though, feared for his family. ‘I don’t like this,’ he told Cox.

She replied, ‘Don’t worry, it’ll be alright.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘There’ll be trouble.’

He was correct. Belinda’s allegations against Steve Christian’s sons would blow the island community apart.

Cox sent the statement to Dennis McGookin in England in January 2000. Her work was over, but it would be another three weeks before she could get off the island. She was almost friendless in a hostile community—a fact that had become plain on New Year’s Eve, when she stayed in, but someone, apparently assuming she would ring the bell in the square at midnight, had rigged up a surprise for her. One of the locals, Dennis Christian, took her place, and a load of fish oil and guts fell on his head.

Soon after midnight, as the fireworks went off, Cox heard an intruder trying to get in through her office window. They did not succeed, for she had taken to locking her doors and windows, after a document had disappeared. That person, presumably, had expected her to be in the square.

The community made it almost impossible for her to do her job. Jay refused to hold a council meeting to discuss policing, saying he was too busy. Meralda sabotaged her plans to stage a mock court case, as a training exercise. With black humour, Gail Cox told Leon Salt that she would ‘need to wear a stab-proof vest’ for the rest of her stay.

The night before she left, Cox went to see the pastor, Neville Tosen, and his wife, Rhonda. ‘She put her head down and cried,’ Tosen told me later, ‘and said she was sorry she’d ever come to this such and such island, and she was never coming back.’

Cox says that, after that second visit, ‘I felt dead inside … emotionally numb. I really loved that community and I cared about them. I felt so disappointed, so deeply betrayed.’

Two months later, in April, Belinda followed her off the island. Since making her statement, Belinda’s situation had been uncomfortable, to say the least; now police learnt that Randy Christian, who had been living on and off on Norfolk Island, was intending to return. There were fears that she might not be safe once he was back, so Leon Salt made clandestine arrangements to book her on a ship to New Zealand. Belinda’s father was bitterly opposed to the events she had set in train. As he said goodbye to her at the jetty, he told her, ‘It’ll be your fault if the islanders are arrested and the island breaks apart. If you go ahead with this, you’ll never be able to come back to Pitcairn and you’ll be out of this family.’

In Auckland, Belinda was re-interviewed on video by Karen Vaughan, the Wellington detective with child abuse expertise. The British Governor, Martin Williams, told the Foreign Office that she and her mother were adamant that they wanted charges brought. However, he forecast, ‘Their determination could waver, as the family of the alleged perpetrators is very high in Pitcairn’s informal pecking order.’

In Wellington and London, British officials were finally giving Pitcairn their undivided attention. Although they only had Belinda’s and Karen’s allegations so far, they seemed to recognise straight away that these hinted at a wider problem.

Martin Williams wrote to his superiors at the Foreign Office in London, ‘I have no doubt that these are not unique cases. It is far more likely that they are a continuation of a pattern that has been going on for 200 years … If we now launch charges against the two suspects, this may well kindle feuds and resentments about similar cases which have occurred over the years … about which … nothing has ever been done.’

It was clear that, notwithstanding this apparent inaction in the past, something had to be done now. A prosecution, however, would entail massive expense, and the logistics were almost unthinkable. As for a court case, with all the attendant publicity, it would be highly divisive, and potentially devastating, for the community.

Nevertheless, the allegations had to be investigated, and Kent Police agreed to take on the new inquiry. It would be funded by the Foreign Office, with detectives reporting to a Pitcairn Public Prosecutor, soon to be appointed. By April 2000 Peter George, who had worked on the 1996 Shawn Christian case, and Robert Vinson, a high-flying detective inspector in his 30s, were in Australia. Operation Unique was under way.

In Newcastle, 100 miles north of Sydney, the pair interviewed Shawn Christian, who was living there with his Australian partner; three days later, they flew to Norfolk Island to question his brother, Randy. Both men denied raping Belinda, but each of them admitted to having under-age sex with another woman, Catherine, who had moved to Auckland—and so began a domino effect.

In New Zealand, on their way home, George and Vinson decided to call on Catherine. They knocked on her door at about 8 p.m. What Catherine had to say took them aback. As Robert Vinson recalls it, she told them, ‘I can’t help you with what you’re investigating, but I was raped myself when I was ten, by [Belinda’s] father.’

Catherine gave detectives a lengthy statement, listing a number of Pitcairn men who she said had assaulted her during her childhood. She added that this was ‘a common thing on Pitcairn’, remarking, ‘You won’t get a girl reaching the age of 12 that’s still a virgin.’ Although the islanders all knew it went on, she said, it was seen as ‘part of life’, and no one complained about it.

According to Peter George, by now a detective inspector, that statement ‘changed the whole course of it’. Back in the UK, he and Vinson told senior officials that a broader inquiry was needed. The reaction was lukewarm. In Wellington, the worry of Karen Wolstenholme, the Deputy Governor, was that a prosecution might fail and the island would become ungovernable. Britain was also apprehensive about likely criticism of its supervision of the territory. Wolstenholme warned in a memo, ‘Pitcairn has a great deal of followers internationally and however the investigation proceeds I think we can expect negative publicity and condemnation for our actions.’

Ultimately, the Foreign Office had no choice: Catherine’s allegations were too serious to disregard. The parameters of the wider inquiry were set. George and Vinson would trace every woman who had grown up on Pitcairn since 1980. Leon Salt, the Commissioner, gave them names and addresses. There were 20 women in all.

Salt, although helpful, was gravely concerned. In his view, the criminal behaviour was ‘a cultural issue’, he told Wolstenholme, probably involving ‘most males on the island’ and ‘going back many generations’. If the men were brought to trial, he prophesied, ‘the inevitable outcome will be the collapse of the community … and its abandonment of the island’. Families, he said, ‘would have great difficulty co-existing … Healing differences between families would be impossible.’

The Governor’s legal adviser proposed a radical solution: a general amnesty, conditional on offenders admitting their guilt. Karen Wolstenholme was among those who welcomed the idea, describing the situation as ‘partly of our own making’. She commented that it was ‘not altogether surprising if the community does not see the laws as applicable to them’. However, a decision was about to be taken over diplomats’ and lawyers’ heads.

Baroness Patricia Scotland, the British minister responsible for the Overseas Territories, had been following developments in the Pitcairn case closely. In May 2000 Governor Williams met with Scotland in London. He reported back that she wished the legal process to take its course, ‘no matter the cost or the implications for Pitcairn’s future’. ‘No question of an amnesty,’ Williams’ hurriedly faxed note to Wolstenholme concluded, with those words underlined.

In August 2000 Peter George and Robert Vinson, the detectives assigned to Operation Unique, returned to the Antipodes to start tracing the 20 women on their list: most of them lived in Australia or New Zealand, with a few in Britain and the United States. Accompanied by two New Zealand detectives, Karen Vaughan, the sharp-witted willowy blonde with child abuse expertise, and Paula Feast, police worked at a hectic pace—flying into a city, hiring a car and often just turning up on people’s doorsteps. Yet ‘every door we knocked on,’ George told me, ‘we got the same response … Every Pitcairn girl, and I mean every single one, a 100 per cent hit, had been a victim of sexual abuse to varying degrees.’ Vinson remembers, ‘We got disclosure after disclosure. It was staggering. It was like opening the floodgates for some of these women.’